


in reference to motility, please proceed

by Saul



Category: All For the Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gratuitous Animal Metaphors, M/M, everyone's trying their best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2016-05-23
Packaged: 2018-06-10 06:40:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6943903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saul/pseuds/Saul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>She could be so small</i>, he marveled. She was a cat, sleek and windy. A mouse, whiskers perfect and round ears quivering. A moth, fragile and dusty. A caterpillar, wriggly and colorful. <i>She almost disappears.</i></p><p>“Alex,” his mother chided, her voice low and hand tight around his upper arm, but if she wasn't looking at him it would've taken him a moment to know who she meant. She was scared, she’s terrified, her pupils are dots, even though they were just in the second last row of a near-empty greyhound bus. “Stop playing. Are you listening to me?”</p><p>In his hand, Marie turned into a pill bug and curled up tight. He closed his hand around her, making her disappear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in reference to motility, please proceed

**Author's Note:**

> same warnings that apply to the canon apply here! there is animal v animal and animal v human violence, too, though they're not technically animals, if that helps? ah. read at your own discretion.
> 
> honestly this is probably the most self-indulgent thing I've ever written, I hope all other daemon loving trash prince(sses) enjoy it too.

**I.**

_She could be so small_ , he marvels. She was a cat, sleek and windy. A mouse, whiskers perfect and round ears quivering. A moth, fragile and dusty. A caterpillar, wriggly and colorful. _She almost disappears._

“Alex,” his mother chides, her voice low and hand tight around his upper arm, but if she wasn't looking at him it would've taken him a moment to know who she meant. She looks haunted, the circles under her eyes larger than life itself, and she’s so scared, she’s terrified, her pupils are dots, even though they’re just in the second last row of a near-empty greyhound bus. It’s been a week of greyhound buses and trucks and her fear. It’s been a week since he saw his father. He’s fine with that. A week since she’s said he’s never playing Exy again. He’s less fine about that. “Stop playing. Are you listening to me?”

In his hand, Marie turns into a pill bug and curls up tight. He closes his hand around her, making her disappear.

 

**II.**

“Keep going,” his mother instructs him. She’s less fearful now: now her eyes are hard, full of fire and brimstone, promising hell if he steps out of line. He misses the fear, a little, just a bit, the tiniest microscopic amount, because at least then she wouldn’t make him do this. They’re in a parking lot. It’s late, no moon in the sky; her swan daemon, his once-white feathers dusted dirt-brown, watches from the nearby golf station’s roof. He doesn’t watch Nathaniel. He watches for by-passers, for knives, for anything that isn’t them, and he never wavers. “Don’t look back, Chris. Keep going.”

She has Marie in her hands, cradles his heart and soul and tries to treat it delicately but it pulls, the bond pulls, and he keeps going like she says because afterwards she sometimes looked pleased with his progress and that was better than the fear and worth every step of this.

Is what he thinks when he starts to feel the stretch, but then the warning becomes a bell becomes a foghorn becomes a hot iron on his shoulder and a knife in his gut and it hurts, it _hurts_ , and he stumbles and trips and can’t go on.

His mother’s voice snaps like a whip-crack in the darkness:

“Keep going!”

In her hands, Marie shifts from armadillo to turtle to rat to anything that knew how to survive against all odds. He feels it, can feel the pain and hear her crying, little hiccups and wails and hisses and yowls, begging for it to stop when he can’t say a word. Beyond that, he feels his mother’s determination, feels his very life in her hands, and tries to listen to his mother.

Marie is a salamander, a frog, a tadpole, its mouth gaping. Marie is an earthworm, writhing and dying in the open air.

“-- Chris, Chris-- I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please--”

She meets him, pulls him into her lap, cradles him like she’d cradled Marie. He remembers her hair around his face, getting in his mouth and tickling his nose. He comes back in pieces, Marie a mouse quivering in his sleeve, and his mother apologizes, apologizes, apologizes.

“I can’t do that, you know, it’s only-- they say it’s only before a daemon settles, it has to be you, _you have to survive._ ”

It’d been a year since he’d last played Exy, and they were in Montreal in Canada.

“I’m fine, mom,” he says, once he can breathe.

“Really?” She asks him, and means it.

“Really,” he says, and wishes he did.

 

**III.**

“We’ll try again later.” She murmurs into his hair, and then pulls him to his feet, because they have a car now and they should get moving. She has a lot of money in her bag, he’s seen it, a whole mound of it. They need new papers and a new start, despite the fact that next week is the middle school’s quiz bowl and a nice girl with curly brown hair named Tabitha was competing and she’d invited him to watch and he’d said yes and she’d smiled so wide it nearly blinded him. He’s not sure why they have to leave. He asked once, but he doesn’t ask anymore.

“Okay.” He says, and closes his hand around a pill bug.

 

**IV.**

“Hey,” Marie whispers into his ear two years after he last played Exy. That’s how he always thought of it: _it’s been so-and-so many years since I last played Exy._ He’s thirteen, and it’s still easier than thinking about his father. “Hey.”

She’s a goldfinch, a little chirpy thing, and her name is supposed to be Yvonne. His is Stephen. They live in Germany, but here, in the flat him and Mary-now-Michelle share, they speak English.

“What?” He whispers back, runs his finger over her delicate head and prods at her thin wings. She nips his finger with her orange beak, then hops onto it. He obligingly holds her close to his face.

“If a ham sandwich is better than _nothing_ , and _nothing_ is better than _life itself,_ ” and here she pauses to nip his nose, makes him smile, “does that mean a ham sandwich is better than life itself?”

He snorts, and she puffs up, all pretty bird pleasure.

“Stephen?” His mother calls from the doorway, and he drops his hand. Marie flits to his shoulder, quick as a bolt, and presses hard against his neck. She quivers a lot when his mom’s around, likes to hide and be small and unnoticed. He doesn’t think too much about it because there’s no use. His mom speaks German, her accent almost gone. “What were you doing?”

“Nothing,” he replies in German, a little more accented. It reminds him of Marie’s joke, and he fights down a smile.

His mother isn’t as amused. “We’re in Germany,” she says, and his joy dims. “We’ve always been in Germany. We don’t speak English.”

“But--” He says, because he’s still got the light in his chest, a little goldfinch on his finger, and he just wants his mom to _understand._

“Don’t you talk back to me,” she snaps, and she’s a wispy creature by now, bony and translucent, but she’s still got fire and brimstone in her eyes and she looks at him like he’s the sun, not just her son, and she doesn’t want to share him with anyone else. “ _Practice._ If our luck holds, we should be here for a while.”

He wants to go back to America, where the classes aren’t split up by how smart you are and he wouldn’t stand out more if he were in the top level instead of the middle with the noisier and rougher classmates. He misses peanut butter and school mascots and kids who didn’t make fun of how slow he speaks when he has to concentrate on what word to use. Frustration wells, an aggravation that comes quicker these days, and he hasn’t forgotten what his father was like and he doesn’t want to go back but he _hates_ Germany, hates it, and everything’s always different but at least America was a little less so.

She sees something in his face and it makes her sadder, and he hates that, too, because it makes him feel like he’s doing something he shouldn’t be but he doesn’t even know what he’s doing, he’s just _feeling_.

Before he says anything, she says, “Do you think it’s easy for me to be here? Do you think it’s any easier for me to learn a foreign language?”

“No,” he mutters. Marie crawls into his curly black hair, a dark, tiny chameleon no bigger than his thumb-nail.

She looks ready to snap at him for that, too, but then the steel in her eyes relents a little and she doesn’t seem to know what to do with him, and that’s the worst.

Hanging in the doorway like a wraith, she finally repeats, “ _Practice,_ ” and then she goes back to the other room. The grainy old television flips on, the German news dry, droning and boring. Her daemon remains out of sight: as the years pass he’s become little more than a sentinel, everything about him walled off and stern and protective and cold.

He flops on his stomach and balls his fists in the sheets and shoves his face into the pillow and shudders and maybe cries but keeps his mouth shut tight.

After he’s feeling hollowed out, the frustration gone into nothing, everything in him watered down to nothing, Marie whispers, “We could do homework,” this time in German.

Throat working, he pushes back and wipes his nose with his sleeve, and nods.

 

**V.**

He’s sixteen and Marie has to hold her form because it’s weird for someone his age to not have a settled daemon.

Whenever they’re inside, away from possible prying eyes, Marie zig-zags through five different forms, a burst of energy and relief and _you can’t stop me_. His mom’s daemon watches them with beady black eyes, his feathers ragged and grey, and says nothing.

 

**VI.**

He’s seventeen and his mom’s daemon is silent and still, reddened feathers broken and head tucked listlessly under a wing in the backseat of the car. It’s the first time in days that he’s closed his eyes. In the end, all his watchfulness didn’t matter.

He becomes dust before his mother does, a golden pile that scatters in the wind.

Neil hates him a little for that, that he got to disappear first.

 

**VII.**

Millport is cold and Neil begins to count like he had as a child. _It’s been a month since I’ve started to play Exy again._ It feels wrong, a habit he’d broken himself of years ago, but it helps.

Marie is named Andrea, and she’s meant to be a rabbit. She doesn’t hold it, though, and one day in math class he looks down and the brown furball in his lap is a grouchy-looking hognose snake and he nearly throws her across the room, it startles him so badly. He manages to not, though, and instead shoves her under his shirt slow and easy so no one notices. Fortunately, no one does, because no one talks to him afterward about it, and they _would_ , since he’s the _only_ kid who doesn’t have a settled daemon.

“What are you doing?” He hisses at her later, when the team has cleared out of the locker room and she’s still a snake, the shower on to mask his words just in case.

She stares back at him and flicks her forked tongue.

He feels old, useless frustration well up, which is, at least, a break in the endless paranoia that follows him whenever he’s not on the court. Instead of shaking her like he wants to, he gets dressed and shoves her in his hoodie’s big pocket and says, “Whatever. Stay in there. Don’t let anyone see you.”

The next day when he wakes up in the abandoned house she’s a lioness, her ears back and massive muscles tense.

That day, he pretends to be a dad, calls himself in sick, and skips school.

The next is the start of the weekend, and he doesn’t leave the house because she’s a donkey, she’s a chimp, she’s everything and anything that wouldn’t fit in a pocket and she’s _mocking_ him, she _refuses to talk_ , she’s _cruel_ , he _doesn’t have time for this_ , and the ice in his head from his mother’s burning body cracks and he kicks her, he pulls her fur out, he hurts and hurts and hates and when he’s curled up in the corner silent and hateful, she nudges between his knees as a quivering rabbit, and he clutches her and finally cries his heart out.

 

**VIII.**

Coach Wymack is tailed by a burly black bear named Helen, and the two match perfectly when she rears onto her hind legs and roars for them to _stop!_

Theodora is an ugly, oversized rodent, her teeth sharp and her whiskers bent, and she has Marie-named-Andrea-the-brown-rabbit by the throat, and there’s a blood on the locker room floor and Neil feels like he’s choking along with her, not just from the racquet blow to the stomach. Andrew Minyard’s daemon is a tasmanian devil, and he’s the devil himself, grinning with white, white teeth and a mania in his eyes. The two just barely listen to Wymack.

Neil snatches Andrea to his chest as he scrambles back, and she shivers, her heart for once matching her form.

Kevin Day, his daemon a dusty-coated, lean, hooved African animal with horns broken down to nubs- _a bushbuck_ , Neil remembers; the papers over-analyzed him like mad, he had a few clips in his binder, of before and after the skiing accident--, looks at Neil without recognition. Beat by beat, his heart slows, and somewhere in the mess, he signs his life away.

 

**IX.**

He sleeps on Wymack’s couch and Andrea hides in his sweater pocket, ever silent and ever shifting.

He moves into the dorms, and so do some others. Andrea sleeps under his blankets, curled close to his heart. _Thump thump thump._ She’s only a rabbit in hints and flashes, and never with the same coat color; mostly, she stays in his pocket, and for a blissful bit, they don’t notice. Each fox has their own problem. Their daemons reflect it. They don’t remark on peculiar behaviour.

Then Andrew takes his binder and he picks the lock and Nicky asks, in German, “ _Didn’t we lock the door?_ ” and then, in English, “Uh, what’s that?”

Nicky has a sleek river otter poking a head from under his arm, her eyes wide and blinking. They’d stared at him when he’d chewed Andrew out, but now they looked below his eyes.

Neil looks down to find a white weasel poking its head out of his pocket, its needle teeth bared and fur bunched up in threat, and its eyes pinned to the tasmanian devil that gives her the same treatment.

“Don’t go through my things,” he says, one more time, in emphasis and also to cover up the shake in his voice. Then he turns, slams the door, and goes for a run.

Andrea, a long-limbed cheetah, follows him from a distance. He’d turn on her if she got too close, but she still can’t stray far. Another thing his mother hadn’t succeeded at, though he supposes he could continue her efforts.

(He can’t, not really.)

Later Wymack keeps him back after the others clear out of the locker room, his mouth thinned into a hard line. He stays silent as Andrea shifts from brown rabbit to brown mouse, a little fuzzy thing that curls up in Neil’s palm, her beady eyes rapidly blinking. To Wymack’s side, Helen shifts on her great paws, her heavy head held low. She has kindness in her, but she’s practical, and protective, too, and considers the Foxes her cubs much the same as Wymack considers them his children.

“I’ve seen a lot,” he says while Neil keeps his gaze over the coach’s shoulder, “but this is a first. You’re, what, nineteen?”

“It won’t be a problem,” Neil tries. He doesn’t know what to say, this situation running far off the planned script. He’s never been caught. He’s still breathing.

“I’m going to need you and Andrea to run a few more tests for Abby, just in case,” he says, and he tries not to look it, but Neil feels the uncertainty in the tone and, absurdly, shame threads underneath his fear of Wymack kicking him out. Despite everything, he thinks he still wants to play. So he nods, and agrees. Then the coach goes on with, “And I need you to talk with Betsy. Try to figure out what’s wrong. See if she can’t help you work through it.”

Andrea scampers up his sleeve, and he feels her change into a beetle, hard-cased and single-minded. He thinks, _we’ve always been someone different, you won’t change that._ He carefully does not protest.

Wymack has a touch of pity in his eyes, or so Neil sees.

He ends up in Betsy’s office every Monday for three weeks before she smiles a patient smile and confesses that this isn’t something she can help him with if he’s unwilling to be helped, especially since most of the tactics used in settling a daemon were strictly for developing youths, or long deemed medieval. She goes on to say she’ll tell Wymack it won’t be an issue, but if he ever thinks it is, he can always come back, even if he just needs a place to sit and be still. While they talk, her daemon tries his best to draw Andrea out of his pocket, his big red-furred head full of wrinkles and folds, everything about him soft. It's a terribly misleading look considering his breed's purpose.

When Neil leaves on that final day, he finds he can breathe again.

 

**X.**

An extensive catwalk runs the length of the Eden’s Twilight’s ceiling, and people’s daemons head up it with flashy accessories of their own: baubles, sequined collars, earrings, bracelets, even a vest or two. Their people mingle freely underneath, no threat of brushing another’s soul in their dancing, and the daemons above tumble and whirl and strut, a mass of fur and feathers and flashing scales.

Andrea is a sticky-toed gecko under his too-tight shirt, and she does not leave him.

Andrew’s Theodora doesn’t either, though as he sobers, she looks a little more real and a little less feral. She stops hissing and puffing up at anything that gets close to her, and starts crowding into Andrew’s arms, though he doesn’t pay her the slightest bit of attention. The other’s daemons race up: an otter in a miniature tux, followed by an unadorned bushbuck and unenthused porcupine. Neil doesn’t have the energy or mind to pay attention to them.

Nicky crowds his mouth with dust and presses his hand over the bump Andrea makes on Neil’s chest, and he twists away, broken lights flashing in his eyes, vision slow and thoughts far-away, and when he wakes up they tell him Andrea shifted into a shaggy mountain goat in the hallway to the bathroom and rammed her head into his until he fell unconscious and they’d never seen anything like it, and even though she’s a still and silent shrew huddled in his hand, he tells her _thank you_ when they’re alone again. She blinks beady eyes at him and turns away.

 

**XI.**

Seth’s daemon is a honey badger, a mean, fearless thing quick with her claws and teeth. In the middle of the game against the Jackals, she clambers on top of the bench in the daemon’s special holding box and sinks her claws into Kevin’s bushback’s flank.

On the court, Kevin stumbles and his shot goes wide to the tune of Seth’s laughter. Neil doesn’t know what they’d been bickering about, what point Seth could have possibly made, but Theodora retaliates on Vivienne with single-minded vengeance, prompting Allison’s brilliant red rooster, Allen, to launch on Theodora with his wings up and spurs out. When Theodora rolls him into Aaron’s puffed-up porcupine, he screams with a high, piercing sound that echoes out of the glass box, and Allison collapses where she stands. It takes Wymack’s bear and Matt’s bear of a dog to break up the fighting and Allison is taken off the court for the rest of the game to carefully pluck quills from her bird.

They lose the game miserably.

 

**XII.**

Riko’s daemon is a crow, not a raven, and Neil knows it’s a shameful point by instinct, by calculation, by simple mathematical process.

Andrea shifts into a raven on live television, bigger than Riko’s crow by half, her plumage a beautiful sleek black and her eyes stern and disappointed, and Neil opens his mouth and takes Riko apart, and Seth dies.

 

**XIII.**

“Hey,” he whispers to Andrea, to Marie. She’s a grey ferret in his lap, and her whiskers shiver as she turns toward him.

Looking at her, he thinks about the Spanish homework he has to to do, and Matt’s morose silence in the evening, the shadows around his eyes, and how Allison and Renee stick close together. He thinks about Betsy and her calm, dopey-eyed bloodhound daemon, and how Dan went for an extra session, her tan weasel curled around her neck, and Kevin’s fear about being disqualified worked out in sessions growing longer and harder, and then he thinks about how he knows about these things, and the words stick in his throat.

Marie waits, but then she butts her nose against his chin, and he strokes down her slinky body, and breathes again.

“I could really go for a ham sandwich,” he finally works out. She huffs air at him, a ferret’s short-breathed laugh. He doesn’t smile, but it eases something tight in his chest.

 

**XIV.**

A huge, colorful bird with a wicked beak and bulging red eyes, Renee’s daemon, Louis, terrifies Neil and Andrea both.

He’s a bearded vulture, Neil learns from frantic googling after he’d met all his teammates and their daemons. They’re the only species of bird to live largely off scavenged bone marrow. Their beaks are sharp enough to crack through a lamb’s femur, and they’re smart enough to drop too-big bones from soaring heights to get at the good bits, and they’re known to attack live prey more than any other type of vulture, seizing turtles or lizards with massive talons and carrying them up, up, up, and letting them fall down, down, down.

He speaks with gentle words that echo Renee’s, but unlike her, he doesn’t try to appear smaller or less than what he is. He’s friendly with the other daemons, but always maintains a physical distance. He’s too much potential and too many secrets and whenever he turns his eyes toward Neil, Neil turns away.

Renee gives him space, but her daemon never stops watching him.

In his pocket, Andrea is a pill bug, is a worm, is a fragile moth, is anything his animal look-alikes wouldn’t want to eat.

 

**XV.**

If the medication makes Andrew manic, it reduces Theodora into a beast.

Neil has never heard her speak a word. She snuffles, and drools, and ambles aimless circles around the locker room, to the point that Nicky and his otter keep up conversation just to keep the predator’s shuffling from being the only sound. She doesn’t care if she picks a fight with a daemon or a human. Andrew fit himself in between Riko and Neil after the talk show, and she bit into Riko’s ankle, sent him stumbling back far quicker than a fist would’ve and his daemon crowing in outrage, and she cackled, letting the blood drip from her chops. Sometimes Neil swears he hears her outside his door, the shuffle-sniff-hiss of an ugly devil, but aside from the first meeting, she doesn’t bother Andrea or him much, so he forgets it.

 

**XVI.**

They all go to meet Nicky’s parents, and Neil isn’t sure why he’s there.

He doesn’t care for Luther or his ox daemon, her eyes at once challenging and unyielding. Luther is used to being in control. His wife, her black terrier daemon skittish and forcibly cheery at her feet, is used to being controlled. Nicky tries his best, but they don’t open up, they don’t even _try_ , and Neil wants to leave. Andrew does, or seems to, the time he takes ticking too long. The dinner can’t be over fast enough. He goes to the kitchen with Aaron, and Andrea is a jackrabbit down the hall, leaping up the stairs, so he takes the racquet and follows and Aaron follows and behind him, a confused porcupine named Penelope.

(It really was a silly thing, a porcupine named Penelope.)

Rough sounds come behind a locked door, Andrea scrabbling at the base as a lioness, as a leopard, as a panther, shifting so fast one big cat may as well be another. Her claws leave deep grooves in the wood, but it isn’t until Neil wedges his foot and _kicks_ that the door opens, and there’s a man with his trousers around his knees and a laughing Andrew with his hands pinned to the headboard and Aaron is in the room with a from-the-hips swing, Penelope’s quills on point in a corner, her head hidden and legs tucked, and Marie the tigress rumbles like an overheated engine.

Neil doesn’t catch Drake’s daemon before she disappears in a puff of golden dust, coating a dead-eyed and silent Theodora in a glimmering coat. The sight reminds Neil too much of his mother’s daemon before he disappeared: she’s limp, her breath whuffling from her in quiet, desperate gasps, and Andrew won’t stop _laughing._

The others rush up, and Marie turns on them with a bone-rattling snarl and then, when Luther appears, a roar that shakes the very walls.

“Leave,” Neil says in the deafening silence after from his place by the bed, quiet and still in his own right.

Nicky’s father backs off once he regains his wits, and the police are called, and Marie is nothing but a mass of orange striped muscle and lips-curled fury standing watch over Theodora, and they can’t convince Penelope to leave the room until Aaron walks so far their bond pulls her from it, and Nicky hides his face for the trip home, and then Andrew’s re-evaluated and Neil makes a promise and then he’s gone.

 

**XVII.**

Kevin works harder and trains longer and they keep each other company as much as people like them can keep other people like them company, two run-aways with fear in their hearts and Exy on the brain.

 

**XVIII.**

Later, Neil is in the girls’ room with Matt, Andrea a warm support of cheetah along his back, and things aren’t even close to normal, but they don’t make him pretend as much as they used to, and isn’t that something.

“What’s it like?” Dan asks, maybe tipsy and maybe too close by virtue of being too tipsy, and Neil leans away before he says, honestly confused,

“What’s what like?”

She points at Andrea with a wobbly gesture. When that doesn’t work, she elaborates with, “The shifting.”

Neil’s still confused.

“Jason used to shift,” he says, or, rather, hopes. If anyone had popped out of the womb knowing what she wanted, it’d be Dan Wilds.

She laughs, so he breathes easy after that half-second uncertainty. “Well, yeah, but that was ages ago. He settled a day before my eleventh birthday.”

“It was a great present,” Jason pipes from across the room where he’s nuzzled into Sasha’s thick black fur. She’s a bernese mountain dog, a force to be reckoned with and originally a source of anxiety for the rabbit-sized Andrea, but now looking at her, her tongue lolling out of her mouth and her paws in the air so Jason can lay on her belly, there’s no imagining a bad bone in her body. Of course, Matt’s needle-pricked arm begs to differ, but that hadn’t smeared his soul. “I never topped it.”

The mention of how early Dan’s settled at first freezes Neil up, and he searches her voice for mockery or awe for the weird or anything to hint at her true intentions, but then Andrea nudges him with her head and rumbles out a crackly purr and he has to give it up.

“It… doesn’t feel like anything,” he says. Dan scoffs at this; Matt boos; Allison _huh_ s disbelievingly; Renee tilts her head. He struggles, and restarts, tries again. “I know when she does it, I guess? It’s like seeing a shadow change shape in the corner of your eye.”

“Ooh, poetic,” Dan says, and she’s definitely tipsy. But she’s not mocking, and after a moment she nods, accepts it, and changes topics to how awful a history professor is.

Later that same night, when everyone else except Renee is drunk, Jason and Sasha challenge Andrea to change from cheetah to bird to weasel to Bernese Mountain Dog, and fall over laughing when she does. Neil watches her out of the corner of his eye, his hands curled in his lap, and tries not to think too much about it.

 

**XIIX.**

It’s the winter formal.

It’s following Jean and his thin black whippet to the locker room, and Riko, and Kevin’s pale face, and his father’s reminder, and Andrew’s chance at recovery, and tickets, and, after, a lie about an uncle that wouldn’t even know how to visit him.

 

**XIX.**

It’s Evermore.

He’s told to appreciate the sky and regrets that he didn’t listen. Punishment from nowhere, reward non-existent, rings around his wrists and the beginnings of claustrophobia over black walls and a black ceiling and too-close quarters. The sky is gone, the night never ends, and Exy, a sport he loves and loved and will always love mocks him, the court a promise of pain and disappointment. Riko, sadistic and pleased that he’s there, becomes the deliverer.

Every Raven player dyes their daemon black; every Raven player has a match, and they share everything; it doesn’t occur to Neil what that means until Antoinette butts her head into his side and Jean’s hands rest on Marie’s back. Marie screeches, _too much too fast_ , and Neil jumps as if burned -- and Antoinette snaps at Marie, vicious and growling, and Jean shakes Neil’s shoulder, tells him to shape up, and everyone else glares at the commotion, and Riko’s smile stretches so very wide, his crow preening on his shoulder.

Putting his hands on Antoinette leaves him feeling nauseous and uncomfortable. She’s a wisp of a dog, her breed begging for grace but her eyes perpetually gummed half-shut, her nose ever dry, her attention slow to focus, and if she isn’t on her side panting, she shivers as if they’re in a freezer. It couldn’t have been possible that she looked so ill at the winter formal, and it shouldn’t have been possible for her to _be_ so ill, but then Neil sees how Jean takes a damp washcloth to her eyes and holds her muzzle shut until she breathes quieter and also how he never _really_ looks at her with anything beyond disdain. Putting his hands on Antoinette continues to twist his stomach, but something grows between them as the nightmare stretches on, and eventually, he learns she has a never-ending itch between her eyes that she’ll go belly-up to have scratched, and that her paws are always cracked and cold but she’ll stop wheezing if only she can tuck them under a warm leg or, once, under Neil’s shirt.

“ _You’re spoiling her,_ ” Jean mutters at him in French during meal-time, everyone in their pairs and rows with their daemons at their feet and their conversations placid and proud. Usually Riko is right there, but that day - that hour? - he’s speaking with his uncle. Antoinette presses along Neil’s legs, shivering but mostly quiet, her mind obviously somewhere else despite Jean’s piercing gaze. Sometimes Neil wonders if Jean managed what he hadn’t, a partial splicing, and he couldn’t feel her pain or emotions or anything else, and that was why he didn’t so much as flinch when his teammates stepped on her tail or twisted her ear for something Neil failed at.

Neil wants to say _maybe if you treated her right, she wouldn’t be dying_ , but daemons didn’t work like that. They didn’t catch colds. Even bed-ridden humans could have healthy daemons. It wasn’t right, that she was so sick, that she was turning to dust before Jean’s time. Neil had seen people with daemons like this before, and _treating her right_ wouldn’t have made a difference. But he’s in Evermore, he’s a fox in the raven’s nest, and all he can really think when he can think at all is _I’m here for them, not you_ , so he keeps eating, keeps his eyes down, and shrugs. Marie pecks at Jean’s hands when he reaches for her too fast, but he grabs her anyway, as if proving a point to _someone_ , and it clenches Neil’s heart but the less she pecks the gentler he is and soon enough she huddles against his neck and preens his short-cropped hair and the two of them might as well have switched daemons, they take so much better care of each other’s than they do their own.

Eventually he can’t fully remember why he’s there, and works on surviving.

He forgets where Antoinette likes to be itched, and there’s no time for her to tuck her paws someplace warm. Jean keeps murmuring French in his ear, but what he says is a spider’s thread, a glimmer of light swallowed quickly by the dark.

Aside from Riko’s sadism and Jean’s compliance, there is one constant: Marie, a sparrow, a thrush, a grosbeak, a red-breasted robin, a common nightingale. Whenever the crow flies away, she sings and sings and sings, flitting in circles and tucking in high corners and perching on Jean’s finger, singing, singing, ever singing, reminding them of the dawn that comes after a long night.

 

**XX.**

Neil remembers this:

A wooden desk, orderly and unremarkable, history books on its shelves and a frayed letter tucked somewhere within. A testament to Riko’s arrogance and grief and need to have him back.

Atop the otherwise empty table top rest two short horns, the bases jagged and broken. Tan and sleek, what strikes Neil most is that they look whole and hale, like they’d been plucked off the bushbuck not an hour before, and he marvels that one day they’ll be nothing more than a pile of dust.

 

**XXI.**

Neil returns.

Helen cradles Marie in huge, gentle paws, and Wymack’s jacket bunches under his hands as he sobs and hiccups and remembers how to be hurt.

 

**XXII.**

A blink and a day and a year and an eternity later, Andrew returns.

Theodora lumbers rather than ambles. Her eyes are clear, and she’s as silent as him, her stout body an unstoppable force that leads Andrew around, the human ever a step behind the daemon. She takes to sprawling in his lap and whispering in his ear, her crooked whiskers wobbling as she speaks words no one else ever manages to catch. He doesn’t react, but he doesn’t shove her away, and it’s different but in a good way, Neil thinks, a better way, even though sometimes Andrew seems like a toy duck on a string, and her fierce form is the only reason he still moves.

The others skirt around them: they see a daemon ready for a fight, and a doubled viciousness in the newfound silence.

Andrew sees his scars and accepts them. There’s a promise Neil isn’t sure either of them can keep, but he knows he’ll try.

On his way out, Marie tells Theodora, her voice rusty but sure, “You’ve got grey hairs on your rump.”

Neil is more shocked than Andrew or Theodora, who take the words with a head tilt and tiny show of teeth, respectively. A beat, then Theodora replies, “Being around you probably put them there,” and they’re gone, and Neil turns to demand-- or ask- or beg- Marie _what_ she meant by that, if that was the first thing she’d said in ages, if she chatted with everyone, but she changed from rat to turtle and hid in her shell while she ignored his questions and he almost, _almost_ took her to Louis to force the answers out of her, but he never would have actually done that, and overall, it’s an interesting day.

 

**XXIII.**

There’s a lot of blood in his locker and in the showers.

 

**XXIV.**

There’s a countdown on his phone and blood rushing through his ears.

 

**XXV.**

There’s bridges, and kindness, and togetherness, and he remembers every precious moment under the sky on a rooftop next to someone afraid of heights but not afraid to keep living, he remembers keys and _new_ cars and how Aaron’s porcupine rolled over to let Katelyn’s meerkat curl up on her soft stomach and Andrea’s voice as she chattered with Dan’s stoat about the advantages to being a stoat and Nicky tripping into friendship with people he wasn’t related to and Neil remembers a whole lot besides.

“Hey, you know, she doesn’t shift as much as she used to,” Nicky comments one day with a contemplative look at Andrea, and Neil doesn’t have to think if the words are mocking, hasn’t had to worry about that for a while. He bumps his elbow into Neil’s side for a good-natured ribbing, and then smiles unapologetically when Neil rolls his eyes. “Think you’re getting cozy in the fox den, Mr. Josten?”

He doesn’t think so, but Nicky’s right. Although the colors and technical shape change on the day-to-day basis, Marie goes weeks as a rat or weasel or ferret. They’re slated to go to the Championships and she spends an age as a cheetah, slim and swift-footed and a little nervous, and for a bit, Neil wonders. She still won’t talk to him, but she moves like she’s comfortable, her spotted coat a blur as she takes off during their runs.

He remembers it’s been over a year and a half since he started playing Exy again, but he can’t remember the exact date or time, and he remembers he’ll die soon, but mostly he remembers cigarettes and the warm, steady stripe against his side and how to breathe easy.

Andrew kisses him and leaves him, then comes back, he always returns, it’s eerie, Neil should be more concerned, he says _you’ll stop when I say no_ and it’s trust or something close enough, and then they do a lot of kissing, and that’s pretty good. It’s great, actually. It’s on the top in the list of things Neil would like to keep doing before he dies. At first it’s clear Theodora doesn’t want to be anywhere near Neil or Andrew or Marie while they kiss, but slowly she stops trudging off and stays and then trudges closer and then, while Neil is distracted with kissing and only half-listening, tells Marie, “Quit trying to be impressive,” and Marie shifts from a cheetah to a piebald rat, small enough for Theodora to fit her whole jaw around her neck and arrange how she wants, which she does, carefully and fussily and with a lot of grumbling that Andrew doesn’t acknowledge, and in fact seems to want to keep Neil from noticing, which Neil doesn’t mind in the least.

Later he says, “Don’t touch her until I say,” and Neil blinks at him. He remembers a sickly dog drawing warmth where it could, and the way his mother’s hands had kept Marie from reaching him as he tore himself in half. When it came to Theodora, he hadn’t been planning on it.

“Alright,” he says, and Andrew scowls.

He has scars down his arms and accepts Neil’s as easy as breathing. He shares black bands, and keys, and himself, bit by bit, and Neil takes what he’s given and adores every second.

A countdown reaches its end after an incredible game, and Neil goes, Marie a brown rabbit in his arms. Andrew looks at him, and knows something’s wrong, because she hasn’t been a rabbit in months and Neil says _thank you_ and the others are safe, untouched, unthreatened, and a riot might break out but they’ll be fine, they’ll be fine.

 

**XXVI.**

They stuff Marie in the trunk with Lola’s mongoose daemon, and leave Neil with Lola.

There’s a lot of blood in the car, down his arms, across his face, in the air, in his lungs, under his nails, on her hands.

When Neil and Lola climb into the trunk, Marie is a bloodied Tasmanian devil, one eyelid torn to shreds and an ear torn clean off and Lola’s mongoose has scratches but he’s smart, he’s clever, he’s quick, and Lola stomps on Marie’s hissing form until she shifts into a hooded cobra and the mongoose almost devours her alive. But not quite, not yet, and _they’ll be fine,_ his foxes, his friends, _he’s ready to go._

 

**XXVII.**

His father says, “Hello, junior,” and he isn’t ready.

Marie is a tortoise in her thick shell, is an armadillo curled tight, is a pill bug in his pocket, and Neil’s throat goes raw and the light catches on an ax and Lola’s grin and his father says, “I can make sure this lasts all night,” and, “Where’s your daemon, boy?” and Neil wishes they could both disappear.

They dig her out and she’s a nightingale swift to fly, and it honestly startles his father, makes him lose his grip on her, and she’s a dragonfly through the vents, and the bond pulls, and _pulls_ , and Neil finds breath to scream, his heart ripping in two, and his father chuckles, low and pleased at this, at least, at this self-inflicted problem.

The Butcher has his ax, and his cleaver, and his beast, a hulking boar with wickedly curved tusks that matched two puncture wounds in Neil’s back.

“Unnatural,” Lola clucks from over his head. “We sent birthday wishes and everything, junior.”

By definition with an unsettled daemon and no diagnosed cause, he’s a child. Even if the Butcher cared about the technicality, he didn’t care if he carved up children, his own or otherwise. His father’s boar paws impatiently under the ventilation grate, hoof dragging ragged on cold concrete; before the pull eases, before Marie doubles back, his father sets his ax to Neil’s cheek and smiles a wicked smile, and Neil isn’t sure at that moment if he has room for more pain.

His father is happy to teach him.

Miraculously, he doesn’t get the chance.

 

**XXVIII.**

“Where’s your daemon?” The suited men ask him.

Eyes closed, sterility in his nose, arms bandaged and face stitched, he says he doesn’t know.

They don’t believe him.

He says he’ll answer anything if they let him see his friends. They don’t fully believe that, either, but they comply, and that’s all that matters.

 

**XXIX.**

Andrew snarls, “Stay away,” Theodora a bristling animal once more, the noise from her throat terrible and crackling, and they do. Everyone who matters is there. Everyone is safe and fine and whole, and Neil wishes he had a smile that wasn’t his father’s, but they seem to know anyway even in their fear and confusion, and that’s what home’s like.

They give them time alone.

Andrew checks his face, his arms, his new and old scars, and stays. He doesn’t ask, but Theodora sticks to his side and watches with beady eyes, quiet and - maybe - wondering. Neil says, “She’s fine.” Andrew frowns, because he knows what that might mean, but then he really looks, and accepts that, too.

 

**XXX.**

He goes home.

In the Tower, Marie shifts from a dark, tiny chameleon no bigger than his thumbnail and into a soft, tan-and-white rat, her pink ear regrowing, says a quiet, tentative greeting, and Dan’s daemon knocks her down for an extensive welcome-home-slobber-fest courtesy of Matt’s until Theodora nips Sasha’s shoulder and gets her to move so _she_ can tuck Marie under her, and everyone digs out their wallets with a groan and makes Allison a richer woman. Allen doesn’t stop strutting whenever he passes another Fox, tail fanned and feathers shining, until three days later when Louis sits on him, and Dan won’t let Allison forget the indignant squawk he made, oftentimes by miming it herself. Wymack hides his grin by turning away when he hears one of Dan’s impressions, but Nicky makes a comment along the lines of, “Aw, coach’s being sappy,” and Kevin growls about the Championships and the Ravens but the bruises fade quickly from his throat and.

It’s home.

 

**I.**

Neil remembers this:

In the basement of a rented cabin, alcohol lingering on his tongue, Andrew presses him down and licks into his mouth and it’s sloppy and messy and absolutely fantastic. Warm breath at his ear and teeth on his jaw and his spine arches, the night still and quiet around them, existence narrowed to this shift, to this touch, to this and this and this. He has his arms looped over Andrew’s shoulders after a _yes_ , one hand curled tight in Andrew’s shirt, the other tangled in his hair, and he’s on fire, he’s happy, he’s everything and more, his legs splayed on either side of Andrew’s, and Andrew huffs, “Overeager,” against his lips but it’s as fond as he gets, loose in a way he hadn’t been before, and if he keeps a hand’s breadth between the rest of them, Neil doesn’t mind in the least.

Embers in his very heart, Marie slow and sleepy and content, her head rested on paws tipped with sharp claws. Theodora is no more casual than her human with her touch but she’s fine with tugging Marie’s tail or prodding her belly or nipping her neck until some imaginary quota is fulfilled and she settles over her like a blocky blanket. Marie never disappears in these moments, and Neil is more thankful than he could ever say.

Andrew and he sleep close but not touching. In between them, Marie sticks a skinny paw into a deadly mouth for no reason at all, and Theodora guffaws and shoves her, then drags her back.

 

**II.**

But that isn’t the end.

The Moriyama family shifts, an empire creaking on an unsteady foundation, and Louis soars over the car Renee takes to fetch Jean, his shadow long and reaching under him. Ichirou finds Neil and his raven daemon looks like everything Riko wanted to be. Neil offers, and breathes, and waits, and then searches for those he’s sold.

Kevin for the first time puts a hand on his bushbuck, taking solace. At the foot of Jean’s sick bed, Antoinette raises her head and looks at the small room like she’s seeing the world for the first time.

They play the Ravens, and Riko brings his fate on himself in the shape of a racquet swung in Andrew’s presence, and later, Ichirou collects him and Riko and Tetsuji above the stadium, and words are exchanged, and a smaller bird that looks childish and weak next to its brother and uncle scatters into golden dust over pooling blood.

And the Foxes win, which in and of itself is a beginning.

 

**III.**

This should have been the start of his second life, of Neil Josten, but it wasn’t, because Neil Josten began with the Foxes and ended with Andrew Minyard, and it wasn’t until an hour after he came back from Ichirou’s room with a smile to the cheering of teammates high on a win and they all piled into the bus that Nicky’s otter hopped over to Marie’s seat and asked, “Wait, is this it?”

No one paid the otter much attention, too wrapped up with jokes and bets and elation unmatched, but then Louis craned his neck and picked his way across the seats as Renee watched, and he moved with intent so rarely, people’s eyes turned and landed on Marie, then Neil.

(He’d chosen _Neil Josten_ , but Andrea became _Marie_ , because it didn’t do to forget one’s past, and really, she wasn’t so different.)

(They’d always changed who they were, but _if we’re lucky, this will be for a long time._ )

Neil blinked back at them, shoulder-to-thigh pressed against Andrew, tired and happy and unsure why he was suddenly the center of their attention. Not scared, though. He hadn’t been scared of the spotlight in a while - not in their group, anyway. Eventually he asked, “What?” and Aaron snorted, a rough, not entirely dismissive noise, and drawled,

“Your daemon, dipshit.”

Neil glanced at the red coat and white-tipped tail, long legs spilled over the back bench, Theodora nipping at her chipped ear. Both daemons blinked back to the group, though then they, too, looked toward Neil.

“Am I missing something?” Neil asked, honestly baffled.

Nicky’s otter raised what counted for her eyebrows and tittered out a nervous, “Um, maybe not,” before scuttling under the benches back to her human. Louis gazed a moment longer, but then Renee turned away with a smile, and he too shuffled back, his great talons leaving an unintentional trail of holes in the seats behind him.

“Stop showing off,” Neil heard Theodora grumble up at Marie. With her long neck stretched, Marie easily had a foot on the devil; when standing, she seemed to tower, though she was a skinny, bony thing.

“I can’t help it,” Marie sighed back, and Neil thought it peculiar, but Andrew caught his chin and turned his head for a kiss and he didn’t think much more on it.

“You’re an actual idiot,” Andrew whispered against his lips. Neil hummed agreeingly.

The others streamed out the bus, but Marie caught his sleeve with her teeth and held him back. Eyebrows pinched, he gazed down at her: a maned wolf, like a stretched out fox, gazed back. She was always what the situation demanded, what she _needed_ to be, he thought, and it was a good thing, it was fine, but maybe they didn’t need to survive like that anymore. She lifted her head toward him - he cradled her sleek head in his palms, the fur coarse against his scarred hands, and smoothed his thumb under one brown eye.

“Neil,” she said, the first word she’d spoken to him in two years. The second and third and fourth were, “We can stay.”

 

**IV.**

They remain, just as they are.


End file.
